What is the lady like that the knight meets in the poem "La Belle Dame Sans Merci"?

The woman the knight meets in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" (The Beautiful Woman without Mercy) is a femme fatale. That is, she is a fatal woman. She is beautiful, alluring, and irresistable, and ultimately the downfall of any man who falls for her. 

The narrator finds the knight in a barren land where "he sedge is withered from the lake, / And no birds sing." The woman, then, not only destroys the knight, but the land around him as well. (This is a common motif in ancient myths, such as that of the Fisher King, who is wounded and is thus the reason his realm is a wasteland. The same motif can be seen in Sophocles' Oedipus.)

This femme fatale is "beautiful, a fairy's child" (13-14). She is a lady (not a peasant), and her hair is long and her step is light, meaning she is graceful as well as comely. However, her eyes are "wild" (16); this is emphasized, appearing thrice in the poem. Her wild eyes suggest she has an untamable spirit, which makes her even more irresistible to the knight. When he makes decorations for her from the flowers on the mead, she looks at him "as [if] she did love, / And made sweet moan." She is, then, an alluringly sexual creature. 

He is a gentleman, placing her on his war horse, but he cannot take his eyes off of her. In turn, she doesn't just sit and ride; she bends sidelong and sings "a faery's song" to him. This song, we may assume, has a magical, seductive quality. 

She lives on the mead, and thus finds him plants to eat, including roots and wild honey and manna-dew, all sweet things. (Manna-dew is a reference to what the Lord gave the children of Israel to eat in the Sinai Desert, which implies the knight's lady is a goddess-like figure.) 

She seduces him--emotionally--with her looks, her moans, her songs, her food, and her words, then she weeps and sighs, bringing out the protector in him. Then she lulls him to sleep where he sees the many men--kings and princes--who have all died at her hands and warn him of his fate (she has him in "thrall," meaning he is her slave). 

Despite this knowledge, he shows no desire to leave. 

Perhaps a better question is who is this lady? Is she Love? Or is she, perhaps, War--the "lady" so many men are seduced by and even when they know they will die at her hands, they are powerless to leave her? 

In "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," what attracts the knight to the lady?

It is clear that from the beginning enchantment or some form of magic is at the heart of the attraction that the strange lady is able to provoke in the Knight who is left the worse for ever meeting her. However, at the same time, it is clear that the lady's beauty has something to do with it. Note the way that the knight describes the lady in stanza four:

I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful--a faery's child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

Note the way that her beauty and her enchantment are linked in this stanza. She is "full beautiful," in fact so beautiful that the knight concludes she was a "faery's child," or the product of magic. The "wild" description of her eyes combined with the way that she made "sweet moan" also add a frankly sexual element to the attraction. The way she is described and the actions that she engages in suggests that she is casting some kind of spell over the night, as she sings a "faery's song" to him and gives him "roots of relish sweet" and other such offerings to eat. Reference to her "wild, wild eyes" is again made later on in the poem when the knight kisses her eyes four times and closes them.

Thus it is that if we examine the poem the nature of the attraction seems to be in the way that the lady is able to enchant the knight with her beauty and magic. Her other-wordly nature is stressed throughout the poem, and so we can imagine that the knight finds her exotic and attractive.

There is very little description of the lady in "La Belle Dame sans Merci." Keats's depiction of her is deliberately impressionistic, allowing the reader to imagine the details of her face and figure. The most comprehensive description comes in the fourth stanza:

I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

The phrase "a faery's child" suggests that the lady is young, small, slender and light, an impression accentuated by the next line's "her foot was light." The detail of the lady's long hair makes the absence of any detail about the face it frames particularly conspicuous.

The poet later says that he shut the lady's "wild wild eyes" with four kisses. This repetition and double emphasis on the wildness of her eyes suggests that it was an important aspect of her beauty, as is her sadness, her moaning, weeping, and sighing.

Although she is a lady (a term which implies civilization, the polished manners and dress of the city and the court), there is something untamed and free about her. The epithet "Elfin" is applied to the grotto where she takes the knight and she sings a "faery's song" as well as being a faery's child. There is clearly something other-worldly about her beauty—something which defies description and must be left to the imagination.

What view of love is presented in the poem "La Belle Dame sans Merci"?

Keats's poem depicts a knight who is enamored of the ideal of love represented by a capricious fairy who has left him with "The latest dream I ever dreamed/ On a cold hill's side."  The knight is bereft now that the ideal--the beautiful woman without mercy--has left, for he has sensed the transience of beauty; moreover, he has also had a glimpse of immortality.  He suffers the living death of one who has once tasted of this immortality, for the more one understands of beauty and love, the more desolate one is without it.

Can you explain the poem "La Belle Dame Sans Merci"?

The surface meaning of this poem is about this knight who is entranced and lured by this woman in the wilderness, a faery queen.  The knight succumbs to her and is enamored with her, as they both immerse their hearts within one another.  The knight wakes up at the end of the poem and is alone, with the woman nowhere to be found.  The exact meaning of the poem is fairly complex and difficult to ascertain.  Knights, by virtue, as supposed to be chaste and resistant to all charms, especially those of women.   The fact that he gives in to this proves to be tragic, as he sacrifices his virtue for the woman that he supposedly loves.  Another version of the poem could be that the knight is already dead, as we see "a lily on thy brow."  The lily is a flower that is used to symbolize death.  The poem is structured in 12 stanzas, each with an A-B-C-B rhyme scheme (Look at the first stanza:  "arms" and "lake" do not rhyme, but "loitering" and "sing" do.  Look at the fourth stanza:  "meads" and "light" do not, "child" and "wild" do).  The imagery used in the poem creates the feeling of the knight descending into another world and an element of mystique is present:  ""The sedge has witerh'd from the lake" (line 3) and "No birds sing" (line 4) help to establish this mood in the first stanza.  The first meeting between the knight and the woman happens in the fourth stanza and their eventual joining in some type of love happens in the fifth and sixth stanza.  On one level it seems very physical, but there might be an emotional component present, depending on how one reads it.  The ninth and tenth stanza presents the conflict in the poem, when both the knight and the woman are riding through the wilderness and the knight sees former kings and princes (who are either dead or have fallen victim to the charms of the woman).  The knight, himself, realizes this when they say "Hath thee in thrall," which is meaning, "She has you, also."  The conclusion of the poem ends with the knight being alone and even wandering or sojourning on his own.  The theme of the poem might relate to broken relationships and being on one's own.  There might also be a warning to people who embark in relationships without a proper foundation of understanding and communication.

What is the poem "La Belle Dame sans Merci" about?

In the first 12 lines we learn it is late fall, the grasses have all "wither'd" and the birds are long gone for the winter, and the harvest is now over.  The speaker comes upon a sad knight, who is described as sad both physically and emotionally.  The mention of the lily and the fading rose describe his pale face.  The words "moist" and "fever" hint at him being ill because of his state.  He asks the knight "O what can ail thee?"

In lines 13-24 we find that there indeed is a lady involved.  She is described as a "faery's child" suggesting that he has fallen for a goddess of some sort.  Most of the time these relationships between mortal and immortal don't work out well for the mortal. He is completely enamoured with her, and mistakes her feeling for him as love.  He then gives her gifts of "garland" and "bracelets." She has complete control over him and his feelings for her when she sings to him her "faery's song."  This enchants him further.

Then in lines 37-48 the knight has a dream.  In this dream he is warned by others who have loved and lost from "La Belle Dame sans Merci," which means the lovely lady without pity.  He doesn't listen to them, though, and when he awakens, the world is void of beauty.  Now that he's seen true beauty, all else in the world pales to her.  The setting and his view of the world finally come together.